This is the claim I most wanted to be true and it survives contact with the sources cleanly. BirdLife's own species assessment records the Hungarian population falling from 2,000 to 2,500 pairs in the late 1980s to 600 to 700 pairs in surveys from 2003 to 2006, then recovering to 1,200 to 1,300 breeding pairs over the following decade, crediting active conservation measures and citing Palatitz.

A quarter of former numbers, then a doubling. Both figures in the article are the figures in the literature. Slovakia's nest box scheme stopped a decline too.

The assessment adds one sentence the article does not. The Hungarian population is now "highly conservation dependent on artificial nests." The falcons did not recover. They were rehoused, and somebody has to keep maintaining the housing.

Here is the whole of it, in Yong's own paragraph. "Estimating them in the sky is impossible," Palatitz says. The article then gives the species population as up to 400,000 individuals. Then Palatitz says, "I think I've seen one million birds in the air."

BirdLife currently estimates 287,500 to 400,000 mature individuals globally, derived from a European population of 115,000 to 160,000 mature individuals taken to be about 40 percent of the world total. An older and more generous figure puts total individuals, immatures included, at 300,000 to 800,000. The March gathering happens after a breeding season, so juveniles are in the air and the relevant comparison is the total, not the mature count. Even so, one million sits above the top of every published estimate of the entire species.

Not in the reporting. Yong put the impossible-to-count line, the 400,000, and the one million in three consecutive sentences and let the reader see the tension. That is the correct handling and I want to say so plainly.

It goes wrong in the headline, which is "A Million Falcons Went Missing," and in every aggregator downstream. A man's awed estimate of a sky, offered immediately after he said the sky cannot be estimated, became a count. The team is in fact trying to do this properly, by measuring roost area and the carrying capacity of the trees. That number does not exist yet. When it arrives it will be the interesting one, and it will be smaller.

The article states that in summer the birds are spread from Hungary to Kazakhstan, and that for six weeks "every last one passes through this tiny, 1.5-square-mile region."

The tags went on 28 birds, from Hungary, at the western edge of the range. The species breeds from Belarus and Hungary east through Ukraine, Russia and northern Kazakhstan to northwest China and the upper Lena River. Europe is roughly 40 percent of the global population. Over half of it sits in the agricultural landscapes of Kazakhstan and Russia, thousands of miles east of any bird in this study.

What 28 Hungarian transmitters can establish is that Hungarian birds converge on Falcopolis. Extending that to the Siberian and Central Asian majority is a hypothesis, and a good one, and not a finding. BirdLife's account, citing Palatitz himself, has the bulk of the population wintering in the Kalahari with Angola listed as passage, and notes that distributions shift year to year with rainfall and insect abundance.

The honest version of this sentence is that a species nobody could count turns out to have at least one place where a great many of it can be found at once. That is still an extraordinary sentence.

The article does not mention the bird's conservation status anywhere. In 2021 the IUCN uplisted the red-footed falcon from Near Threatened to Vulnerable, on criteria for a past and projected decline of 25 to 45 percent across three generations. It was Least Concern as recently as 2004. The trend is still down.

And the drivers are not in Angola. They are rook colony collapse and pesticide use in Kazakhstan and Russia, where part of the population is suspected to be declining at over 70 percent. The article treats pesticides as a future Angolan threat to the termite swarms. In the assessment they are a present cause of decline on the breeding grounds.

The narrative arc of the piece is decline, then nest boxes, then doubling, then discovery, then hope. That arc is accurate for Hungary. It is not accurate for the species, which is in worse shape now than when Palatitz started and was reclassified upward in threat five years ago. Leaving the status out makes Falcopolis a wonder. Putting it in makes Falcopolis an emergency, which is the better story and the one the conservation work is actually responding to.